The manufacturer of this piece of electronics calls it a back up network server. It's purpose is to function like an external hard drive for storing data that won't fit on your computer's hard drive. (for example the gazillion of pictures that I take each year.)
I call it The Bad Black Maxtor. I liked it until this morning. I've uploaded my digital pictures to it since 2003 and everything has been so happy.
And then this morning I went to move some of the 176 pictures I took yesterday to it's giant storage and nothing. I mean NOTHING! The web support page says that the little red light glowing on the right hand side is the red light of death.
And my pictures are in there!! I was having a hard time breathing as my dear (and desperate) husband spend the entire day trying to recover -just the almost most precious thing in the whole world to me. (I suppose I like my kids more, but the pictures don't talk back)
He can see every one of my photos on the manufacturers' secure web site but in 10 hours he was only able to download one half of one page out of 78 pages of pictures.
I was told that there is no safe magnetic storage for pictures. I swear that if I get them back I will put every picture on a CD and never let this happen again.
How do you store your digital pictures that let's you sleep peacefully at night?
5 comments:
That's awful. I'm not sure if your unit is like mine, but I had a Seagate external drive. It got jarred and stopped working-can't remember if it even lit up. Thanks to Googling, I read that it was common for the outer case/electronics/button to fail, but that the drive inside could be retrieved. Sure enough, I took mine to a local computer place and they cracked it open and were able to put the guts into a new external drive and I had my images back. Good luck to you. I have fears about CD storage too... The best may be a paid service online. The onus will be on them to keep upgrading with new technology.
I keep mine backed up on an external hard drive too. Between facebook, different computers, the hard drive and pictures that my mother saves I figure most of them are out there somewhere. But if I had to go back and recover them all it would be quite difficult and time consuming, so I hope my little external drive does not fail.
"pictures don't talk back" [smile]
I haven't tried something like this, but have you considered an online backup option, like Mozy?
~Luke
Grrr, I empathize. I have way over 15K photo's since I got my first digital camera; plus scan's of all the pre-digital photo's... then, years ago, my hard drive crash turned my world upside down. I was able to retrieve some, but other were lost forever. So, I started using SmugMug, an online safe archive and sharing site. They allow unlimited uploads of full resolution photo's, video's and if you subscribe to their Vault, you can upload all document formats to have your important stuff safe too. They keep your stuff safe - you can store everything precious as if you put it in Fort Knox. You control everything: all accessibility features; size of images; how it displays; themes; printable/or not; searchable/or not; private; password protected; etc..., you even get deals on printing and other stuff from their parnters.
There is a small annual fee, but I have a coupon to help get started. I love them, it's a small family run operation, excellent customer service; lots of tips, tricks and training on "how to"; and there is a community forum. Lots of professional photographers use them and often offer advice in the forums. They have 3 different levels of service. I'm a Power User, to get access to the Vault and other additional features.
Use the link below and my email address to use their coupon - aside from the savings, I've already saved the anual fee x 10; by not having to purchase hard drives and paying to recover lost data just last year when mine went belly-up.
Here is what they tell me to do with the coupon: "Simply have your friend enter the email you use at SmugMug ( denise56@optonline.net ) or personal coupon ( RZ1cc2veU8FDg ) in the Coupon field at the end of their trial. Or, you can give out this link for them to try us out: https://secure.smugmug.com/signup.mg?Coupon=RZ1cc2veU8FDg
Hope this helps.
Love you,
Denise
i make 2 cd copies one for my house and one to be kept safe at my moms house.
Post a Comment